[lbo-talk] Engineering Economics is usually a three-hour junior course

John Adams jadams01 at sprynet.com
Wed Jun 15 05:42:17 PDT 2005


-----Original Message----- From: N P Childs <npchilds at shaw.ca> Sent: Jun 14, 2005 8:52 PM To: "lbo-talk-lbo-talk.org" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Subject: [lbo-talk] Fwd: lbo-talk Digest, Vol 18, Issue 147


>>Hard to say. Engineers seem to gravitate towards monetary quick fixes, be
>>they the gold standard or post-Keynesian credit schemes. They also think
>>the system could be run rationally, like a machine, as if you could just
>>design your way around greed, violence, and irrationality. Economists are
>>sort of like that, in their own way.


>There used to be a guy in Ottawa who ran for parliament every election
>under a whacked out social credit platform (ie printing money) called John
>Turmel, aka 'The Engineer'. He was that approach personified.

Probably the most well-known former proponent of social credit was the sf writer Robert Heinlein. His early left-wing history didn't really come out until after his death, but the signs were there all along in the early writing. You can read a sf treatment of social credit (which, although a crank scheme, at least was a crank variant of socialism) in his early novel _Beyond This Horizon_, which is quite different in many ways (and yet very much the same in others) from his later novels.

The wikipedia entry on Heinlein is very interesting--better than the libertarian socialist entry, that's for sure!

John A

Thanks,

John A

see me fulminate at http://www.jzip.org/



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